Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Tot School - 30 Months

Now that H is 2.5 years old, we've decided to put him to work on the farm. Here he is milking the cow.. :) Actually, H's "Tot School" time has been full of playing, exploring, fun, and learning (even on vacation). He loves to participate in "circle time" with his older sisters and soaks up new information like a sponge. Here's a tiny peep into some of his favorite activities lately..

H has amazing concentration (especially for a boy), but only as long as he's engaged in something he is interested in. He spent almost an hour focused on stacking paper cups after I showed him the basic technique for it.

Most of our learning games have been ad-hoc recently (rather than pre-planned work trays that I made for the twins when they were his age), like sorting toys by color. We also line up toys in a row and then I hide one while he closes his eyes and H needs to figure out which one is missing. H loves to count everything, so there is a lot of daily math play.

I've been testing out some logic games on H. He's great at matching, sorting, and describing objects based on their attributes. We're also working on odd-one-out and analogies which he's starting to understand.

H can read CVC words (by phonetically sounding them out). This is actually a recent breakthrough because although he has known his letter sounds since he was a baby, he could previously only blend letters if I was the one saying them out loud, but now he's sounding them out and blending completely on his own. H is also really good at memorization and knows a number of nursery rhymes and poems by heart.

H likes tracing his letters on the iPad (Letter School app) and playing some preschool learning games, but he enjoys pushing buttons and jumping around a lot, too.

Whenever I take out a game or manipulative for the twins, I try to come up with something for H to do with it at his own level.

It's really fun working with my little guy because I can tell that he enjoys learning and spending time with me. He approaches every activity with so much enthusiasm and I'm relishing every moment of it, especially now that I know that once they turn four they can be more reluctant to do 'school time'.

Of course I can't take all the credit for teaching H how to read... the twins (4 years old) love to "play teacher" and work with him on letter sounds, CVC words, along with math and other subjects. E's favorite classroom setting is making H a desk of pillows in the master bathroom and then writing words for him to read on the mirror using soap. In this video I encouraged her to use some letter magnets instead..